The 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) formally concluded last Friday on January 23rd, however, this meeting of the world’s richest elites effectively ended in 2025 when its founder, Klaus Schwab, resigned in shame. Charges against Schwab of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct plus whistleblower allegations of financial impropriety and research manipulation, though denied by him, led to his downfall after founding the WEF in 1971.
The WEF’s lofty founding purpose was “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”, however, over the years, it has been perceived by critics less favorably. One recent comment on Wikipedia describing the WEF as:
“The formation of a detached elite, sometimes labeled the ‘Davos Man’, refers to a global group whose members view themselves as completely “international”. The term refers to people who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations”.
Despite that U.S. presidents from George H.W. Bush to Donald Trump have spoken at a WEF, the organization’s outlook and its recent Board of Trustees have a distinctive European/anti-U.S. view. The WEF policy actions have been to replace American capitalism with what a European think tank described as, “a model where a self-selected group of ‘stakeholders’ make decisions on behalf of the people”. Schwab’s proposal in response to the COVID19 pandemic, the ‘Great Reset Initiative’, are interpreted as calling for expanding the influence of private corporations, particularly multinational corporations, in policymaking at the expense of governmental authority.
Another Schwab’s investment philosophy of Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), rather than risk and return, the more normal view of investing to promote stockholder value. He called ESG ‘stakeholder economy’; improving policies and agreements on taxes, regulations, fiscal policies and trade will result in “fairer outcomes”. Private investments and pension funds could thereby improve on the old system by building one that is more “resilient, equitable and sustainable” over the long term by “building green urban infrastructure and creating incentives for industries to improve their track records”.
Such concepts came honestly to Schwab, German born and raised, because his father moved from Switzerland to Germany during the Third Reich in order to assume the role of director of an industrial company and contractor for the Nazi regime in concert with National Socialism’s incorporation of German labor and management to industrialize the nation for its conquests in World War II.
Other Schwab’s promotions extended into mandating eliminating the use of fossil fuels to control the planet’s climate. Implementation of those policies through the European Union have devastated their economies, particularly the German automobile industry. That same partial implementation by the Biden Administration reduced available power in the U.S. Midwest during this week’s massive winter storm that required their electrical grids to restarting decommissioned coal plants to keep its citizens from freezing when solar and wind energy production came to a virtual halt.
WEF American Board of Trustees members, Al Gore and Larry Fink, and frequent WEF gadfly, John Kerry, assisted Schwab in promoting the Biden Administration Net ZERO 50 Carbon Emission Industrial Policy in Washington in 2021. These policies destabilized our energy production and raised energy costs here in the U.S. where we have the highest fossil fuel production at the lowest cost on the planet. Through Larry Fink’s BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $12.5 trillion assets under management, he promoted Schwab’s ESG investing to his corporate clients, which he later backed away from when client returns on investment diminished.
Like the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which ended in Belem, Brazil, last November without a whimper, the world would be equally well served if World Economic Forums will depart quietly in the night like Klaus Schwab departed from the scene in 2025. Without Schwab to guide them, the powerful elites of the world cannot be the ‘Master of the World’ as he proclaimed during a WEF keynote speech.
TW3
January 29, 2026
John Whitmore Jenkins
